The Mission: Learning

Reese Madsen, chief learning officer of the U.S. Department of Defense Intelligence, said despite any functional differences between them, corporate and government CLOs serve workforces drawn from the same U.S. population of learners. “So one challenge for any CLO is to be able to reach that student, whether it is a 17-year-old kid or a 50-year-old, well-established government employee,” he said. “They still have to learn.”

Madsen did just that during his 25 years in the U.S. Coast Guard. “In the military they have lots of learning opportunities, and as a student I was always providing feedback to the learning process and programs,” he said. “Ultimately I wanted to help make the process better, stronger and more effective, so I evolved into what I am today.”

That’s Classified

Governments possess a lot of information they can’t or choose not to disclose to their citizens, so a government CLO may handle information that is sensitive as well as proprietary. “In my world of work, where intelligence is in a classified environment, we have different technological challenges being able to use secure networks, classified databases and other tools,” Madsen said.

Conversely, government CLOs may have to disclose more than their private sector counterparts. Lang said working in government is akin to working in a fish bowl because everything must be transparent, and bureaucratic processes are more cumbersome.

Further, government CLOs think of and demonstrate success differently. ROI gets an adjustment. “There’s a different nomenclature in the public sector,” Lang said. “It’s not ROI, because you’re not affecting the bottom line of the board of directors or the stockholders, but you are doing an ROI in terms of return on impact — what impact are you making to the operational components of the agencies that you work for?”